productivity.org over the years

It all started on a 386SX with 4MB of memory over 1200-baud modem. Now, it's a VMware guest on an HP blade server in a datacenter. The server instance has and always will be on Slackware Linux.

1994-1995

The Beginning

While working at the University of Michigan, Justin talked the folks in the Electrical Engineering/Computer Science department into hosting the experimental Slackware Linux instances comedy.eecs.umich.edu and improv.eecs.umich.edu via static IPs over a 1200-baud dial-up modem. The modem remained but the 386-based computer that was productivity.org replaced comedy & improv.

1996

To Missing Link Communications

After leaving Ann Arbor to run the network and computers for a small rural ISP in Galesburg, Illinois, productivity.org moved to T1 connectivity and upgraded to early Pentium hardware.

To the River

The ISP business of Missing Link Communications was bought out by Madison River Communications, based in North Carolina.

productivity.org moved to recycled Compaq desktop hardware remained in Galesburg, Illinois at its Chamber of Commerce Visitor's Center.

2001-2009

From the Heart

Justin left the ISP world and entered the world of finance at Firstar Bank; productivity.org switched to a custom 4U rack-mount server was moved to Peoria, Illinois, hosted at Heart Communications.

During this time, two Java-based projects were created and hosted on productivity.org: Habitat4j to solve complicated deployment issues while Justin worked at U.S. Bank and Syslog4j to robustly handle network logging.

2010-2013

To Joe's

The sweet deal at Heart Communications came to a close; productivity.org switched to SuperMicro server-class hardware and moved to Joe's Data Center in Kansas City, Missouri. At this point, it was a VMware guest on a VMware Server 2.0 host.

2014-Present

To St. Louis

Site Refresh

Continuing with the tradition of learning-by-doing, the productivity.org site was developed by Mobirise and hosted on a Docker Swarm on the blade server. Special thanks to Let's Encrypt project for the SSL certificate.